Germanisches Nationalmuseum

The paper discusses a set of etchings depicting different buildingsin Gdansk (Danzig) and different parts of the city, first publishedin 1617. The artist was the little known Ægidius Dickman, active inGdánsk and probably also in the Netherlands in the first quarter ofthe 17th century. In the same year that these etchings were published,Dickman also finished a large birds-eye view of Gdánsk. The setof town views and the panorama were both republished by ClaesJanszoon Visscher in 1625.The author of the article discusses the relationship betweenDickman and Visscher and their collaboration on this project, aswell as their wider artistic relationship. Dickman seems to have beentrained in the Netherlands, the etchings proving his familiarity withVisscher´s topographical prints.

Digitalization of irreplaceable objects of cultural and/or historical significance as field of research is gaining more and more importance recently. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) in Nürnberg, Germany, and the Development Center for X-ray Technology (EZRT) of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Fürth, Germany, were jointly working in the MUSICES project, addressing issues of 3-dimensional (3D) digitalization of historically important musical instruments. This project was funded by the German research association DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and ends in January 2018. The project partners developed examination standards that, independent of the deployed devices and operating staff, are set to deliver high-quality 3D volume data sets representing musical instruments. Plenty of representative examples carried out during the project ensure the applicability of the technical parameters. MUSICES has been dealing with testimonials of the manufacturing of musical instruments during the last five centuries. From 2015 to 2017, more than 100 historically remarkable objects in the collection of the GNM were digitized by means of fully 3D image acquisition with X-ray CT The CT measurements were performed at the EZRT site in Fürth, where X-ray systems with maximum radiation energies of between 60 and 9,000 keV are used for CT scanning and reconstruction, as well as means for multispectral material analysis and algorithms for the correction, visualization and evaluation of image data. Several methods were applied to optimize CT parameters via extended studies of simulated virtual data sets. In detail, the simulated data sets were based on a simplified virtual representation of the respective specimen. Its orientation with respect to the axis of rotation and in case of dual energy measurements the spectral quality of both partial data acquisition runs were varied computationally until the minimum Shannon entropy of the resulting reconstructed slices was achieved. Parameters identified in such a way beforehand were then applied for the real measurement. Based on the evaluation of all acquired 3D-images, standard procedures are proposed. The image data itself are made available to the broad public. Additionally, the final report published in 2018 provides various checklists for preparation, transport, positioning, best practice for measurement of various classes of instruments (wood/metal/mixed/other resp. size and shape), an elaborate data base structure description for long term archiving and methods for detailed image quality assessment.

There are many ways to model relationships between texts and objects. Creating statements with RDF triples is one of them. In the project ‘Semantic Blumenbach', we have endeavoured to discover and render visible the innate connections of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's (1752–1840) writings on natural history with the physical objects studied and collected by him. After a careful evaluation of existing frameworks for describing objects and texts, we decided to test the Scientific Communication Infrastructure (WissKI) for this purpose. During the project, new modules have been developed, and a workflow to connect extracted knowledge from Blumenbach’s texts with metadata of objects has been established. The data modelling, the ingest workflow, and project evaluation in the context of the on-going discussion about Linking TEI and CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model are subjects of this article.

In the context of the Vienna World Exposition (1873), a group of art historians came together for the first time for an "international" conference. It was not until 1893 that a second gathering of this kind was convened at the GNM [Germanisches Nationalmuseum] in Nuremberg. There it was decided to meet regularly in the future, in order to intensify the exchange of information about current scholarship at an international level.The early conferences had no fixed themes. The emphasis was on exchange about recent research. At first, interest focused mainly on the art of Italy, the Netherlands and Germany. After 1918, however, there was greater attention to Europe as a whole, and then, after 1945, to the United States, as well. This is reflected in the overall themes of the congresses and the titles of the papers presented. The author presents his overall conception for the CIHA congress in 2012 at Nuremberg for which he is the convenor.